


Copper

by thesmokinggnu



Category: Poldark (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Freeform, non-canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-07
Updated: 2016-12-07
Packaged: 2018-09-07 04:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8782741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesmokinggnu/pseuds/thesmokinggnu
Summary: Demelza is everything Elizabeth isn’t and nothing like she expected. Her visits to Trenwith are more regular now: Elizabeth greets her at the garden door where the clifftop path emerges from the woods and they take tea in the small drawing room at the back of the house away from the dark, disapproving Poldark portraits that line the walls of the main reception rooms.Canon-divergent from before S2.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't like most of the S2 plot so just gonna ignore that

 

Most of the stories Elizabeth was told as a child involved Princesses locked in towers until the hero arrived. 

 

Somehow she seems to have gotten that backwards.

 

Perhaps a cage could be made a fortress if one owned it, but Trenwith is a Poldark place, Francis’ place. It’s even more Ross’ place than hers, despite his pretensions to lacking pretensions. The walls are granite: the stone of the county roughly hewn and stacked; an extension of the cliffs and the mines, the copper and the gold that built house and family rising through the gentile lawns.

 

She’d been sent away to school when she was still more girl than woman. Cornwall was no place to learn to be a lady. For a man it was different; his merit considered enhanced by association with the cliffs and roaring tides: the last outpost of England before the wild of the ocean. 

Ross and Francis - loved first as brothers before she was old enough to consider them anything else - were allowed to belong to this place while her home was snatched from her. Stifled in corsets and silk in Bath or London where cobbles replaced grass and the the lifeless drapes in the townhouse windows were never disturbed by the impudence of a sea breeze.

 

First Elizabeth said no: she wouldn’t wait. America and its faraway war seemed like a fiction to a girl of seventeen who’d never seen half of her own country let alone others beyond it. She’d expected him to turn back but Ross just rode off down to the port and Elizabeth wept the moment he disappeared over the brow of the hill.

 

Francis had dried her tears and all those that came after, and then one day he got down on one knee in her mother’s drawing room. People were starting to wonder by that time: there had been no letters from Ross for months. But Elizabeth had recalled that Ross had difficulty entering or leaving rooms without some sort of fanfare and she wouldn’t believe he’d have departed this world without some divine equivalent of a well-slammed door. In the distinct lack of giant waves or quaking earth in the greater Cornwall region she’d assumed (rightly, as it turned out) that not only was he alive but making others regret that they were also.

 

Francis offered her his grandmother’s ring. She said yes.

 

*

 

So she’d been waiting for it: that day when Captain Poldark with shadows under his eyes rode up to Trenwith. There’s a moment, the barest flutter that Elizabeth allows herself before she turns the key on the seventeen year old girl who’d cried at the window so many years ago.

Ross looks at her now like a man who considers himself the first prize and cannot decide whether he feels more pity for her that she did not choose him, or confusion as to why not.

And yet, and yet, there’s an expectation sometimes in his eyes: a complacency that seems waiting for Elizabeth to realise her mistake and succumb to some imagined ardour Ross believes she still holds for him - which itself alone is sufficient to quench whatever lingering affection she might have harboured.

Unlike Demelza. Demelza with her bonfire hair and eyes like cornflowers and the earth of the county under her fingernails. Ross was a predictable man, although he’d take offence to hear her say it. Unbridled nature recognises itself in another.

(She wonders what her own soul might have sought in its counterpart had it been free to choose. Francis is a kind man and ultimately a good one beneath his flaws, but Elizabeth once overheard her mother remark that ‘everything looks like a hammer, if all one has is nails’.)

 

But that realisation of Ross and Demelza’s shared nature came later came later. Seeing the fraying cuff of Demelza's sleeve as she clasped her trembling hands so demurely the first night Ross brought his new bride to Trenwith, Elizabeth had wondered at his motivation; whether she’d been so blind as to miss such ill-will borne towards her for him to make such a point thus.

It was the only time in their association that she’d had cause to question her regard for him; to wonder what kind of man war had returned to them. 

(Although she had not questioned it when he came to near blows with George or Francis, nor when tales of his erratic behaviour wound their way over the moors to Trenwith on the lips of servants. But that was in Demelza’s nature as well: to be the breath of wind that tipped the scales.)

 

*

 

George is bound by the chains of his blacksmith grandfather, while Elizabeth feels like she’s at risk of blowing away, rootless and drifting. 

“So have you met the scullery maid? The new Mistress Poldark?”

“They paid us a visit last week.” Francis’ newfound deference to George Warleggan makes her nothing but uneasy, although she is loath to disrupt it without knowing the cause. Not that her husband has shown any inclination to share it - or indeed anything else - with her.

“How generous of you. Although I can see the merit of a dinner guest who tidies away after herself.”

“Perhaps you should extend an invitation yourself in that case.”

He laughs aloud at that, straightening the cuff of his sleeve under his coat. “Alas, I shall have to defer the pleasure. Although if a suitable vacancy arises I may reconsider.”

 

Ross expects resentment between them, his wife and his almost-wife; Francis is typically uncomprehending; and George would likely be aghast at any sort of companionship between two ladies of their respective stations. Seeking out Demelza therefore seems a rather prudent way, in Elizabeth’s current mood, to vent her feelings toward all three of them.

One’s first ball is always a spectacle, but as she tries to imagine it though Demelza’s eyes Elizabeth considers for the first time that perhaps they appeared faintly absurd in their frivolous luxury. Women like pretty birds in jewels and feathered dresses dancing circles around the gilded ballroom; men with smooth hands and powdered wigs strutting like peacocks.

“Are you quite well, my dear?” Elizabeth graciously inserts herself between Demelza and the heavily perfumed man crowding her in the corner.

“I could use some air.”

Taking her arm Elizabeth steers them to a balcony. The air is crisp with the first brush of autumn, but after the sweet wine and the dancing she hardly notices. There’s a curious kind of equilibrium between the open sky overhead and the string quartet drifting through the open windows.

“This is your first ball?”

“It is.”

Demelza doesn’t elaborate further and the amusing notion occurs to Elizabeth that perhaps she had sought some small flattery or compliment to add but chosen silence over insincerity.

“The room was rather stifling. I believe you were right in seeking some excuse.”

Demelza looks rather startled all of a sudden. “Oh no, I didn’t mean - It was a very fine gathering -”

Elizabeth covered her hand with her own. “I won’t hear your apology, the room was certainly overcrowded and that gentleman looked a frightful bore.”

“I would not say such a thing.”

“Although you would not say otherwise.”

“Perhaps not.” Demelza smiles properly for the first time that Elizabeth has seen that evening.

“See, already your manners exceed my own. Once we have you waltzing they’ll be falling at your feet.”

“Oh, I’ve no use for waltzing. A reel has more skill.” She hums a tune softly and Elizabeth couldn’t name it but there’s an echo of familiarity in her memory, a sound of the quayside and the bonfires and the stamping of bare feet on sand.

 

*

 

Demelza is everything Elizabeth isn’t and nothing like she expected. Her visits to Trenwith are more regular now: Elizabeth greets her at the garden door where the clifftop path emerges from the woods and they take tea in the small drawing room at the back of the house away from the dark, disapproving Poldark portraits that line the walls of the main reception rooms.

 

“Will you not allow me to send someone with you, at least as far as the village? There is no moon tonight.”

Late autumn brings the shroud of night down early over the headland and Elizabeth beseeches her as Demelza takes her leave.

“I don’t wish to trouble anyone needlessly. I know the way well enough and Ross is expecting me.”

“I still don’t see that it would be needless.”

“Elizabeth.” Demelza takes her hands, smiling in the lamplight that spills from the open doorway. “Please do not worry yourself. I know those paths as well as I know myself. Sometimes better, if I’m being honest.”

There’s a way about her; her gaze draws Elizabeth like they’re the only two people in the world, in conspiracy in the privacy of the night. She sees exactly where Ross fell; she’d step in the same places to precisely the same conclusion. 

“Very well. Although I hope you know that having insisted it would be most impolite of you to befall misfortune now.”

“Well if it be improper I’ll be certain to avoid it.” Demelza’s teasing is so so gentle that Elizabeth could never begrudge her. “Goodnight Elizabeth.” With a quick brush of lips over her cheek Demelza turns into the night.

 

*

 

“I can't do it, the pattern's too fine.”

Demelza is accustomed to sewing and darning - practical necessities in running a household - but she struggles with delicate embroidery. 

“Here, let me see.”

“It has gone wrong again, although I cannot see how.”

A bright drop of blood wells from Demelza's fingertip, with its whorls like the seashells Elizabeth collected as a child.

“Here.” Elizabeth raises the finger to her mouth and tastes copper.

 

*

 

After the hard winter the earth finally softens, the sea quietens, and the evening light stretches out over their dwindling kingdom growing wild past the edges of the lawn.

For some reason there are never enough candles; the drawer rattles when opened as the remaining few roll around. These days Francis leaves in the morning and returns late at night without explanation, and Elizabeth resignedly repairs the repairs in her stockings and sees little point in asking questions one already knows the answers to.

After the previous groundskeeper had been caught lifting game from the store Francis had dismissed him and appointed a replacement from near Truro, in the hope, Elizabeth suspected, that the Poldark reputation looked more intact from further afield.

The new man had cleared some brush on the edge of the park for firewood the previous autumn. Now she notices a fire burning through the break in the treeline. Elizabeth’s breath mists the pane as she leans closer, wondering with a slight thrill of apprehension. She jumps at the sound of the door scraping over stone flags as her maid arrives to trim the candle.

“Apologies for disturbing you ma’am.”

“What is that, what’s going on?”

The woman barely looks, sparing the swiftest, incurious glance at the smudged glow away on the headland.

“They'll be burning heather, I expect. Will there be anything else, ma’am?”

Elizabeth stares for a moment at the woman’s boldness. As though it isn't March and pitch black with the new moon, as though they aren't thirty miles from Dartmoor.

“That’s all. You may go.”

  
It happens again on the next new moon, but at Easter the regiment arrives in Bodmin and the fires go out. 

Demelza’s visits fade, although she is all affection and apology whenever she does pay a call. 

Ross hardly visits and Francis never takes her anywhere. Elizabeth fancies she can feel her wits leaving her as they flee the tedium of the empty drawing room. She insists on accompanying Francis into town and waiting in the chaise while he goes about whatever remains of his business.

There is a different air to the place now with Redcoats among the crowds. The harsh winter took its toll, and now the spring tides have been and the shipping lanes are clear once more there should be a sense of relief.

She quickly spots a familiar figure among the crowds, although something stills Elizabeth’s hand as she goes to wave a greeting. Something has changed between them, although Elizabeth is at a loss to think of any offence she might have caused. 

Ross is respected and gifted such affection as is possible for a landlord, an employer, but Demelza walks among the people of the village as one of their own. The basket on her arm is laden with yarn and paper-wrapped packages and its load appears to vary, oddly emptying and filling as she weaves between house doorways and market stalls with the barest glimmer changing hands.

It happens that drinking and gambling with the regimental officers is Francis’ new pastime of choice, and therefore that Elizabeth recognises from a distance the gentleman who engages Demelza in conversation.

Demelza's hand brushes Captain McNeil’s arm as he greets her courteously, and Elizabeth sits a little straighter. The common folk round here are said to have little love lost for the soldiers.  Elizabeth notes that the colour of his coat clashes with Demelza’s hair and it seems somehow confrontational despite their apparent friendliness.

But then again, there are said to be  _ two _ things one keeps closer than one’s friends.   
  


*

 

When some of their remaining shares come good somehow Elizabeth convinces Francis to throw a party the night of the next new moon. Elizabeth neither knows nor has any inclination to learn about the mechanisms of mining and lodes and seams and the indiscernible quality that marks the good ore from the bad. Privately she considers it a sheer game of chance: like gamblers talking about mathematics and sequences to maintain the illusion of control.

Her husband agrees to the gathering, presumably less to satisfy her - because that seems to concern him less than it ever did - and more to press his advantage in whatever incomprehensible points game he, Ross and George play amongst themselves. 

(Possibly Demelza’s outlook is contagious because Elizabeth finds herself with increasingly little sympathy for young gentlemen of the world having nothing better to do with their time and resources than try to one-up one another.)

 

All the well-to-do of the county are in attendance, including of course the officers from the garrison, because what better way to show one’s commitment to upholding the King’s law than by seating its defenders in the place of honour at dinner?

She dances the first waltz of the evening with Francis. Despite everything they still move well together; with grace and understanding in motion that they could never carry over to this inertia they live in now. He has always been a better dancer than Ross.

“Elizabeth. I’m -” Francis covers her hand with his own. “I am trying.”

“I know you are.” She turns her hand over so their fingers are entangled. “I know.”

For the first time in a long time neither of them pull away. He leans down to press a kiss to her forehead and she presses her nose into the faint scent of his cravat.

 

Demelza circulates and laughs and dances and, Elizabeth is sure, spends two hours drinking the same glass of wine.

 

It is shortly after midnight when decoy fires are sighted on the clifftops and the customs watchman arrives at Trenwith with bloody spurs to raise the alarm that boats are landing in the cove. 

Elizabeth is sure she is the only one who notices Demelza slip quietly through the kitchen door.

Ross is challenged of course; it is his land. But he’s into his cups already, well in at the card table and his surprise and innocence are clear when his game is interrupted. Elizabeth sees him glance around the room as he defends himself - there is only one person he can be looking for - and her conviction strengthens as to the orchestration of all this.

His Majesty’s Finest - those who can remain upright - set out unsteadily into the night with Francis at their head to lead them over unfamiliar ground.

 

Carriages are summoned: the great and the good make their way home in haste and bleating hysteria to bar their doors and watch for fire from the windows. It is out of the question of course for Demelza: Ross is riding out with the guard and no woman ought be left unguarded on a night such as this, with who knows what sorts of persons out on the cliffs.

 

Elizabeth returns to the dining room after the last of her guests have departed. The tableau of plates and serviettes from an evening abandoned in haste is somehow reminiscent of Michelangelo. Something about the disarray, the defiance of order and symmetry Elizabeth finds oddly pleasing and allows the servants to retire for the night without clearing it away. She hopes Francis will see it when he returns.

She turns to the stairs, knowing Demelza will follow her unasked. Elizabeth slips off her shoes reaching the head of the stairs and scrunches her stockinged toes in the plush carpet. This room is hers alone; space that Francis allows her in apology for all that’s left unsaid between them. 

The wood of the door sits snugly in its frame without cracks when she closes it and turns the key.

 

“You chose quite the night for a party.” Demelza observes. There’s a slight flush in her cheeks that could easily be from the wine, or the fire burning merrily in the grate.

“I -” Demelza is hard to read in the candlelight, and Elizabeth flounders for the first time, swallowing carefully. If her suspicions are correct - indeed, even if they are wrong - she knows this woman less than she thought. “It would appear so.”

“There will be some who’d wish to thank you, I’ve no doubt.” Demelza draws closer so that the firelight banishes the shadows from her face. She settles on the chaise longue and studies Elizabeth under her eyelashes. “Assuming your husband is unsuccessful in their apprehension.”

Elizabeth sits next to her as a burning log crumples in the fireplace and emits a brief flutter of cinders. “Francis has his ways, and if it were the order of the world that a wife could be responsible for her husband then I’d offer you his apology myself, but since it isn’t I cannot.” Elizabeth reaches out and covers Demelza’s hand with her own. “All I can do is pray that you do not think me so heartless also.”

“Elizabeth,” Demelza turns her hand and clasps their fingers together, while the other brushes an errant curl from Elizabeth’s face. “You must know, I could never.”

Demelza is strong and wild as the tides but she kisses Elizabeth like the first time they met; hesitant and testing and the warmest thing in the house where Elizabeth has lived in the cold for so long.

“Forgive me.” Demelza pulls back, her eyes searching Elizabeth’s for some reaction, some recoil.

“No.” Lifting her chin with a finger Elizabeth kisses her back, kisses her again, and again. “I shan’t.”

 

Demelza leaves her in disarray. Gentle fingers tug out the pins that hold her hair tightly and make her head ache; dance nimbly over the laces fastening Elizabeth’s dress; ruck up her skirts to unfasten her stockings.

There are cool fingers high up Elizabeth’s thigh while Demelza presses kisses to her collarbone, her neck, the underside of her jaw.

Elizabeth pushes Demelza’s own dress off her shoulders and wonders at the softness of pale, freckled skin. Demelza’s fingers slip higher seeking the heat between Elizabeth’s legs and Elizabeth buries her face in Demelza’s neck, nose brushing the soft skin behind her ear. There’s a trace of perfume lingering there and as Demelza presses inside her Elizabeth gasps ecstasy into lilies and violets and knows those scents will evoke nothing else for the rest of her life.

 

By candlelight Elizabeth sees the healing stretch marks on Demelza’s stomach when she raises her shift over her hips.  _ The marks men leave on us _ she thinks as she kisses each one tenderly, then moves her lips lower.

Demelza’s hair spills over the pillows as she cries out into the private glow of candlelight they’ve claimed for themselves in the night. The doors are barred and the house is asleep and there is no-one else to know about the heat of Demelza’s skin and how Elizabeth feels like she’s on fire everywhere it touches her own; how Elizabeth’s thumbs fit perfectly into the divot of her hips; the small purple bruise of her claim left upon Demelza’s inner thigh.

 

Outside in the dark their husbands chase their ghosts and find only bare woodland and empty sand. By the time the sun rises the sins of the night are fled, leaving only the barest traces for those who know where to look.

 

*

 

Francis' aunt turns over Death in her cards again and again. Elizabeth ignores her and watches the roses bloom on the trellis outside the window, waiting for the flash of bright copper hair on the garden path and a knock at the door.

 

 

 

 


End file.
